6.08.2014

Aw, isn’t
little Amadou so cute? No! This child is a thief! And a sneaky one at that.
Here is a brief story of the ongoing saga of catching this little bandit.

I’m not
the biggest fan of the children here in Cameroon (hence why I’m not a YD or ED
volunteer). For one, most of the children annoy me by asking me for things (no,
I don’t have candy for you!), and two, I don’t enjoy being peed on, which
seems to happen every time a Cameroonian child comes into my possession (most likely
out of fear of my red hair, white skin, blues eyes, and my ‘disease’ aka.
freckles). While there are the exceptional children who manage to somehow
break through the Berlin Wall that protects my stone cold heart (my adorable
10-year-old neighbor boy Yaya being one of them), I tend to nonetheless get
annoyed or exacerbated by the majority of small children in Lomié.

Amadou is
perhaps the child I dislike most in Lomié. I must give it to the boy – he is smart,
he is calculated, and he knows how to get what he wants. He also knows how to
be cute so that white people like him, white people such as Grant. I, on the
other hand, could smell his scheming from miles away.

Amadou is
perhaps 10 years old (nobody knows, but that’s my guess) and he goes to
school…occasionally. When not in school, Amadou sells pistache on his
head. Pistache are ground up pumpkin seeds into a tofu-like texture with
dried fish and hot peppers stuck in the middle, all bundled up in a large
banana leaf.

During my
first three months in Lomié, Amadou made it a habit to go through the
same routine with me. Everyday he would show up to my house and knock.

Every day,
he’d ask me for empty bottles. I never have empty bottles, but he never got the
hint. When Spencer was here, he asked Amadou what he uses the bottles for.
Amadou says he uses them for ‘Mauk-eau’, but when we asked him what ‘mauk-eau-
is, he said he didn’t know. What a great salesman!

Despite
his daily visits, I made it a rule that Amadou is never allowed to enter my
house. I actually make it a rule that nobody is allowed into my house unless I
explicitly invite them over. Only my neighbor Didja and my counterpart Sylvia
are allowed to drop by when they want and come into my house without an
invitation. While I didn’t trust Amadou off the bat, I realized his
untrustworthiness when one day I was in my latrine taking a bath and I heard
some noises in my living room. I called out “C’est qui?” to see if
someone was at my door, but there was no response. My front door was locked,
but with the key still in it, and I was showering with my latrine door open so
I could hear if someone came and knocked on my door. I initially disregarded
the small sounds I heard and attributed them to the neighbors. But as I
continued showing, the noises seemed to be far closer than if they were my
neighbors, so I felt like something was out of the ordinary. I peaked my head
of my latrine and found Amadou in the middle of my living room with a bar of
soap I had just bought in his hands. I threw my towel on and began making my
way towards Amadou, all the while yelling about how rude it was to unlock my
house, enter in without permission, and to attempt to steal a bar of soap. I
could tell he was scared (both to be caught and perhaps to be getting yelled at
by a dripping wet, towel-clad redhead) and his excuse was, “but I thought this
soap was candy!” - as if that would be a logical excuse for entering into my
house without permission and permit stealing. After that incident, he became
generally afraid to come to my house - which is exactly what I wanted. I was
again reassured of his bandit-tendencies when he tried to steal our painting
supplies during our HIV/AIDS mural in February. From that day on, I took a
hardliner approach with Amadou.

My
postmate, Grant, on the other hand is a bit more naive when it comes to
Cameroonians and their intentions. Despite being here for nearly 2 years, Grant
trusts everyone and lets everyone into his house. Amadou and his friends enter
Grant’s house, play with his things, and are allowed to hang out while Grant
reads or journals. Danny and I have warned Grant not to trust Amadou, and if
that weren’t enough, many neighborhood kids have warned Grant that Amadou is a
thief. But despite this, Grant was intent on trusting Amadou.

A few
weeks ago, Baba, the son of my friend Zakari, came buy to warn us that Amadou
was bragging to his friends at school that he stole money from the Whites (us,
obviously). Baba is another one of the
few kids that I trust and like. He is a sweet, smart, and hardworking boy, so
when Baba told us this, I believed him. Danny and I knew that Amadou couldn’t
have taken money from either of us because we both keep records of what money we have stashed in our houses, and we also don’t allow Amadou in our houses. So
that left Grant.

Over dinner, Grant was insistent that he wasn’t missing any money. He did admit that
Amadou was hanging out in the room where his money is hidden for quite sometime
one day, but that he didn’t feel like he was missing any. Grant said he was
running low on cash, but that was because he did a lot of camping and had
guests for a few weeks. He insisted that the amount of money gone from his
stash just about matched what he would’ve spent over the last month. When Danny
and I broke down the prices of everything, we tried to convince Grant that it
was impossible to have spent that much money. We also pointed out how strange
it was that Amadou hadn’t shown his face around our houses since he was hanging
out for a long time in Grant’s house that one day. But despite all this, Grant still didn’t believe that Amadou stole any money.

One day,
Amadou was walking by our house and Grant called him over. He decided to just
accuse Amadou of stealing, and see if he admits. When Grant firmly said, “I
know you stole my money, if you give it back, you won’t be in trouble”, Amadou
denied it. But when asked again to return the money, Amadou finally cracked and
said “It wasn’t me, it was my friend!”. Shocked that his interrogation methods
worked, Grant now had evidence that money was indeed stolen. Grant told Amadou
to go get his brother and come back with the money, which of course didn’t
happen.

The next
day, we told Baba that he was right about Amadou stealing money and thanked him
for keeping us informed. When Baba was at the boulangerie near our
house, he saw Amadou and started yelling “Voler! Voler” - “Thief! Thief”. He
chased Amadou down with some of the boulangerie
staff and brought him and his brother to Grant’s house.

Grant
decided to use Game Theory and separate the two kids. He told each boy that the
other confessed everything, and that if they admit to what they stole, he would
go easy on them. Through this tactic, it was discovered that each boy stole $20
from Grant - making it 40$ that was missing from his stash. When asked if they
still had the money, they said they had already spent it.

During all
this, Didja, my neighbor, told me about how Amadou is a known child thief.
Amusingly enough, Amadou shows up to the boulangerie that her husband works at
and steals loaves of bread when the staff isn’t looking. Didja’s husband always
counts how many loaves of bread are missing and notes it for the future. The
next time her husband sees Amadou, he always calls him over and starts eating
some of the pistache that Amadou sells from his head. If Amadou stole
500CFA worth of bread, her husband eats 500CFA worth of pistache. He
then asks Amadou how much he needs to pay for the pistache, and when he
is told the price he replies, “Okay, great, that makes up for all the bread
that you stole yesterday”. Apparently this has happened on several occasions
with Amadou. “He is a known neighborhood thief!”, Didja insisted.

Grant
marched the boys, along with Baba, the boulangerie staff, and a small
group of curious people, down to Amadou’s grandpa who sells meat brochettes
in centreville and told him what the boys did. The grandfather
didn’t seem surprised - he merely sighed and admitted that these boys are a
problem. Allah help them! When Grant said he was going to take them to the gendarmerie
to be punished, the grandfather consented. “Take them to the gendarmerie
or take them to his mother for her to handle it!”. When Grant said, “Okay,
let’s go to your mother first”, Amadou pleaded to be taken to the gendarmerie
- apparently his mother is worse than police interrogation!

Grant
conceded and told the boys to go home and return with the money in two hours,
leaving it up to them to explain to their mom what they did. Grant told them if
they didn’t show up with the money in two hours, they would be taken to the
police. We waited, and waited and they never returned. While we couldn’t get
Amadou out of our hair for months on end, now we can never find him! If we do
see him, he runs instantly in another direction. This incident happened a month
ago. Grant is still waiting for his money to be returned from the 10-year-old
thief, and Amadou has begun selling his pistache far away from our
neighborhood. Moral of the story: Don’t trust cute little kids.

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